


We'll Sleep When We're Dead

by harrigan



Series: J2!BSG [2]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Supernatural RPF
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harrigan/pseuds/harrigan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We'll sleep when we're dead." (Chief Petty Officer Galen Tyrol to crew, Galactica hangar deck.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Sleep When We're Dead

**Author's Note:**

> **Author's note:** Okay. I couldn't resist playing some more in this 'verse after all. My apologies for the brevity. To be honest, this is little more than a segue between the first story and the next (which is underway but not nearly ready to share). For the _nightmares_ square on my hc_bngo card.  
>  **Timeline in 'verse and in BSG:** [Lighting the Darkness](http://archiveofourown.org/works/899132) is the first fic in this J2!BSG 'verse and is set at the end of the re-imagined BSG miniseries/pilot. This story begins a few days after that, and occurs at the end of the next BSG episode "33".

Jensen shot awake, catapulted out of the nightmare like a Viper accelerating down the launch tubes when the mag cats release. He bolted upright, breathing hard, fists clenched in the rough military blanket. Blinking the sweat out of his eyes, he forced his fingers to go slack and let the familiar scratchy texture begin to ground him. He remembered where he was. Not back in his wounded bird, weaving through Galactica’s firing solution, half-blinded by shrapnel explosions as he fought to stabilize the thrusters and make it back before the flight pods were retracted. Before he’d slam into the side of the Galactica like a bug on a windshield. 

He hadn’t crashed. He wasn’t in his Viper. He was in his bunk. 

Finally. 

After five days without sleep. They’d gone over _five days_ without sleep while the Cylons tracked them down. 

Every frakkin’ thirty-three minutes. 

Every thirty-three minutes, the Cylon Basestar hunting them would shoot out of a wormhole and into their airspace, its assault Raiders spilling out and honing in on them like a swarm of rabid bats. Bats with kinetic energy weapons and nukes. And the countdown began again. Galactica and its small squadron of outnumbered Vipers would try to shelter the fleet, bear the brunt of the attack, and provide covering fire while the sixty civilian ships jumped to new interstellar coordinates. And when they were all safely away, the surviving Vipers would screech home in combat landings while Galactica spun up the FTL drive and sealed the airlocks and jumped too. And then began the time-consuming engine cool-down and jump calculations for the next emergency evacuation.

Every thirty-three minutes, the Cylons found them again, and the cycle repeated. Jensen had lost track after about the 237th call to 'action stations' with nothing more than a ten-minute catnap between alarms. By the end, when too many were collapsing from nervous exhaustion, the CAG had ordered some of the pilots still on their feet to take stims, to ensure at least a percentage were alert and functional.

_”Scatter formation! Keep ’em off the civvies, and don’t stray beyond the recovery line!”_

The CAG’s ragged voice over the radio still echoed in Jensen’s ears. A memory flared—the blue-white muzzle flashes and tracer rounds, the flyer on his wing getting strafed, Dinger’s panicked face in the cockpit. Just for a micron. Radio chatter suddenly silenced. And then watching, helpless, as Dinger’s Viper shattered into pieces before his eyes. Flinching as the debris slammed into his own starboard intake and then ricocheted off to spin slowly out of sight. 

Jensen swung his feet off the bunk and sat there shuddering, elbows on knees and palms digging into his eye sockets.

In the end, they’d lost an entire ship, the Olympic Carrier, and another six hundred casualties on top of that—many of them civilians they’d sworn to protect—before the Cylons finally lost their trail. He didn’t know what the Commander and the XO might have come up with in the CIC to shake them off. All he knew was that they weren’t on Condition One alert anymore. They were safe. 

For now.

He’d paid the price for using stims when he finally collapsed in his rack: a series of near comatose states, followed by nightmares, groggy attempts to claw his way awake, and then sucked back into the nightmare, before sinking deeper into a comatose state again.

Every thirty-three minutes? It felt like it.

These weren’t the first nightmares he’d had, though they were the worst. Every frakkin' night since the initial Cylon attack, when the Twelve Colonies had been lost and the Galactica had fled with the last survivors of the human race, Jensen had woken with night terrors. 

Every night but one. The night he’d propositioned a space hooker, and gotten something a little different than he’d bargained for.

Jared. The memory coaxed the beginnings of a smile, but it froze when he considered the damage the fleet had taken. 

It had been five days since he’d seen the young refugee from Tauron. 

Five days under constant attack, in which over _two thousand_ souls had been lost. 

Jensen threw on his fatigues, stumbled out of the pilots' duty locker, and broke into a run.


End file.
